I have written about the widespread pandemic of illiteracy for many years, and I find it odd that there has continued to be an attitude of toleration to the phenomenon – even among people who I consider to be quite literate.

This has bugged me incessantly, and I have puzzled time and again, but have never been able to figure out why there continues to be such widespread resistance to the promotion of literacy.

The relatively obvious situation that many organizations have been able to reap great profits from duping illiterate suckers and thereby emptying their pockets can hardly be „breaking news“ any more. Modern propaganda methods were perhaps first developed at the turn of the Twentieth Century, they were exploited on a grand scale in the Third Reich – but it was truly the Americans who „perfected“ it and turned into a science.

For many decades, the „American Way of Life“ has been associated with progress, wealth and economic development. When the shady details of the mortgage-backed securities crisis started becoming more and more obvious, when people started protesting that they had been duped into debt, then this movement was silenced in short shrift. The message was loud and clear: “Shut up, slaves!”

You might think that might have been a wake-up call. Nada.

Now, or rather recently, there has been another tell-tale sign screaming out of the sinful modern media: The “Fake News” crisis. Will this, too, be swept under the carpet? I think this hypothesis might not be as far-fetched as it might sound to some.

The puzzling evidence won’t go away, though, and it continues to nag me. The other day an idea occurred to me that might help explain some of it, but so far it’s still just a wild guess – and I think I need to think it through some more before I might feel OK with actually putting the idea “out there”. I don’t need to explain all of it, but I do think I want to feel as though it’s no just a random thought-bubble.

My friend Jean Russell shared a really fascinating meme the other day on facebook. The main gist of the idea was that “you are what you think”… such that rather than “I am what you think I am”, in fact “you are what you think I am”.

This is a very powerful message — and yet there seems to be another message hidden behind the surface: Many things are not what you think they are. Some people also use the phrase “the map is not the territory” to draw attention to this phenomenon.

Yet many people make this exact mistake, often many times over — I guess sort of non-stop. Let me give you an example.

When I warn people about the dangers of relying too heavily on Google (or even about the dangers of using it at all — see also “Definition: How to Define “Retard Media”“), they often respond with “what do you have against the Internet?” or maybe “well, I don’t rely exclusively on the Internet”. These people apparently don’t realize that Google is not the Internet (neither is Facebook, nor Wikipedia or any other individual website).

In a similar vein, there is a podcast called “No Agenda” that purports to be all about media deconstruction. I enjoy listening to this podcast very much, but as far as I know neither of the creators of the show have ever given a functional operational definition of what they consider to be media (versus “not media”). As it is, they primarily deconstruct television programming (and also TV ads). But they sometimes also analyze websites (such as facebook.com and/or google.com) — but not all websites… so which websites? Their limited view of media distorts the usefulness of their information — to put it simply: because they deconstruct some things, but not everything.

Granted: deconstructing everything would be a quite formidable task… and it may even be impossible. But since they do not explicitly delineate what it is they want to deconstruct, the result is that the selection of what they do actually deconstruct may very well be quite biased. That is sad, because otherwise I would say that their approach is refreshing and insightful.

I have a friend who works in the field of healthcare, and we were talking about corruption in the medical and pharmaceutical industries – the kind that leads to patients getting misdiagnosed and mistreated. I had shared something I had written with him, and as he is also a renowned author, I asked for his opinion on the piece… which was in particular also quite critical of healthcare providers in his particular niche (though it was not critical of him personally).

He remarked that it was very well written and convincing. I wondered and asked whether he also felt that my criticism of his professional colleagues was warranted. He noted that his profession could hardly be criticised, and agreed that this bad situation is rather the result of a corrupt system. Then he asked me what I intend to do about it.

I was somewhat taken aback, because I feel I am already doing quite a lot. I quite oftenly speak publicly on this and related topics, I probably write even more on them, and then I am also working to correct what I consider to be one of the primary root causes of these very significant, very fundamental problems in the healthcare industry.

In order to explain what I mean, I need to backtrack… more than a decade. Another one of my friends has done a lot of medical research, has quite advanced academic degrees and is also the director of a hospital. (I have many friends who work in healthcare, in part because I spent a large portion of my adult life living very close to a quite well-known medical school) Once in a discussion with many of his colleagues – plus me – I heard him say that the vast majority (perhaps something like 80%) of medical conditions are a matter of psychology, or at least that they are so strongly influenced by the patient’s psychological state, that it is essentially a matter of psychology. This statement strongly influenced my thinking then, and since then I have also not heard of anything that might contradict the hypothesis. Nonetheless, I don’t know to what degree it is an accepted medical theory.

On the contrary, my close affiliations with the healthcare industry – whether as a patient or as a support group leader or even simply many close connections to people affected by a wide variety of conditions – strengthen my belief in this very insightful observation. Another „academic“ friend of mine has quite often mentioned Rudolf Virchow in this vein, maintaining that it was Virchow who first recognized that many illnesses are … something like: socially constructed.

This is no wonder to me. For years now, I have increasingly become aware that perhaps one of the greatest plagues humanity suffers is the way some humans behave with respect to their fellow humans – to put it succintly, many (if not even most) behave abominably. One example of how such abominable behavior plays out „in real life“ is what is often referred to as „bullying“ (or a similar phenomenon known in Europe as „mobbing“). My gut feeling is that whereas bullying refers to demeaning a person in general, mobbing is more about a concerted „social“ effort to „be negative“ towards a person. What I find particularly odd is how the healthcare industry appears to have no problem whatsoever with portraying the victims of such behavior as the people who are ill, sick, who apparently need to swallow pills or whatever. The same holds for many other illnesses considered to be psychological in nature, such as depression, post traumatic stress disorder, etc.

Now let me get back to my discussion I had the other day – and my answer to the question: „what am I going to do about it?“ After being taken aback, something clicked in my head and I replied: The problem is, really, that we measure the value of people using only one statistic: money (see also „the vast majority of people have been drilled with truisms such as the notion that money is a reliable metric of value“). Today, if you have a lot of money, then you are usually considered successful. Likewise, if you have little or no money, you are usually considered a failure. What is more: The validity of many statements (e.g., what is written on the front page of the New York Times) is often considered to be supported by the money „leading“ companies contribute (i.e. as advertisements) in order to show up in support of such headlines (cf. also the definition of „retard media“). The meaninglessness of brand names is very closely related to the anonymity of money as a unit of value, as a technology for transferring value without the friction of any sentiments whatsoever. Ideally, you can easily use „cold hard cash“ to pay for a product or service without leaving even the slighest trace of your name, your identity, or your affilation with anyone or anything on Earth. Your cash bills may contribute to slavery, exploitation, global warming or any other issue on a long laundry list of social diseases… without leaving any fingerprint, footprint, or whatever. Money enables you to be so careless that you are basically free to have no cares at all.

This care-free power of money is probably why many people consider it to be the ultimate measure of success. I, on the other hand, see in money nothing but anonymous power – like that of a king with no face. Money is actually no more capable of transmitting what you care about than a robot is capable of feeling what you feel.

If you want to feel – no, if you want to be attached to something you care about, in other words if you want to engage in a relationship with that thing or person, then you shouldn’t use money to do that. Money leaves no trace. You want to create a bond. You need to sign, your signature needs to be part and parcel of your care, your values, your engagement, your actions and you yourself. You must use an „alternative currency“.

The currency you use must be meaningful, the antithesis of a meaninglessbrand name. Meaning is also socially constructed. You can heal just as well as you can hurt. What are you going to do?

Ever since Sigmund Freud triumphed with his psychological theories, psychological repression has become interpreted as an acceptable behavior. Repression is now OK, because everyone does it.

This post is not about psychology – at least not in the first place.

It’s about ignorance. Ignorance is very widespread in today’s culture. When people „block“ someone on social media, they are simply ignoring them. Likewise, when people ignore their spam email folder, they often say that if something is important, then the person will write again. Hello? Write again?!? LOL, many people are so ignorant that they are even unaware of their own ignorance.

OK, so perhaps: If it’s important they will call on the phone. Ah, yes: the elexir of voicemail! That splend circular file of phone ladders. I am sure people check their voicemail daily… NOT!

Ignorance is nothing knew – even Galileo was the recipient of being ignored. No, even worse: He was considered a heretic. Being a heretic means: If someone doesn’t ignore you, then they must be crazy.

In contrast, I believe everyone can choose for themselves who or what they wish to ignore. To some degree, the vast majority of people on the planet ignore global warming every day. You can ignore this politician or that politician – which one you ignore is entirely up to you. I by and large ignore retard media – though I do keep tabs on what kinds of nonsense other people do seem to pay attention to. Perhaps, though, in reality they really don’t pay attention to it (yet again: many people merely think they don’t pay attention to advertisements; and of course very few people are aware of the fact that most advertisements actually pay more attention to them than the other way around – at least for the vast majority of illiterate people who do not know how to prevent such „invasions of privacy“). They might say something like „I ignore ads“. Uh-huh, yeah, right.

I feel it is very ironic that in this era of „big data“, people are very much involved in a habit of ignorance. Yet again: Here – as in many other examples of what seems to be a quirky kind of rationality – there appears to be a somewhat rational rationalization for this behavior: We cannot pay attention to everything, so we have to ignore something.